Fixing package download performance problems in Manjaro Linux

My adventures with Manjaro Linux continue and I’ve even moved my “craptop” – a somewhat ancient Lenovo X240 that I use as a semi-disposable travel laptop – from XUbuntu to Manjaro Linux. But that’s a subject for another blog post. Today, I wanted to write about package download performance issues I started encountering on my desktop recently and how I managed to fix them.

I was trying to install terminator this morning and kept getting errors from Pamac that the downloads timed out. Looking at the detailed output, I noticed it was trying to download the packages from a server in South Africa, which isn’t exactly in my neighbourhood. Pamac doesn’t appear to have an obvious way to update the mirror list like the Ubuntu flavours do, but a quick dive into the command line helped me fix the issue.

First, update and rank the mirror list:

sudo pacman-mirrors -g

Inspecting /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist after running the above commands showed that the top ranked mirrors now are listed in the US with very short response times.

After updating the mirrors, it’s time to re-sync the package databases:

sudo pacman -Syy

Now with the new, faster mirrors ranked accordingly, I suddenly get my Manjaro packages and package updates at the full speed of my Internet connection rather than having hit and miss updates that take forever to install.